Assertive Discipline in a school for pupils with emotional and behavioural difficulties

The management of difficult and disruptive behaviour continues to be an issue in many classrooms. In this article, Jeremy Swinson, a senior educational psychologist and honorary lecturer at Liverpool John Moores University, and Mike Cording, an education consultant working in Southport, consider the impact of in-service training on the use of Assertive Discipline in a school for pupils with emotional and behavioural difficulties (EBD). Swinson and Cording report improved rates of 'on-task' behaviour for pupils across the age range and reduction in numbers of disruptive incidents. These changes in pupil behaviour mirror an increase in teachers' use of positive feedback and praise. Swinson and Cording argue that these techniques are effective even for those pupils who are seen as being disaffected or very discouraged.     

Problem solving and classical genetics: Successful versus unsuccessful performance

Expert-novice problem-solving research is extended in this study to include classical genetics. Eleven undergraduates (novices) and nine graduate students and instructors (experts) were videotaped as they solved moderately complex genetics problems. Detailed analysis of these “think aloud” protocols resulted in 32 common tendencies that could be used to differentiate between successful and unsuccessful problem solvers. Experts perceive a problem as a task requiring analysis and reasoning and they tend to use a knowledge-development (forward-working) approach. They make frequent checks on the correctness of their work, use accurate and detailed bookkeeping procedures, and have a broader range of heuristics to apply to the problem. It is clear that studying problem solving using the expert/novice design requires that the problems be difficult enough to require more than more recall and yet simple enough to allow novices a chance for solution. Applying elementary probability concepts seemed to be the most difficult aspect of many of the genetics problems, even for the experts.     

Beyond internationalisation and isomorphism – the construction of a global higher education regime

ABSTRACT

National higher education systems are undergoing profound changes, discussed in many but unrelated studies as outcomes of internationalisation dynamics and institutional isomorphism pressures. We propose to link these studies by emphasising the influence of both internationalisation and isomorphism on the formation of a global educational regime. Through a broad range of indicators, we describe the growth of the discursive, normative, and regulatory dimensions of such a global higher education regime. We find evidence of the following developments: (1) a rapidly growing network of international organisations focused on conferences, initiatives, and programmes supporting a global higher education agenda; (2) a striking increase in the number of international and national accreditation agencies, their mutual cross-national recognition as well as the number of universities that are nationally and internationally accredited; and lastly, (3) parallel increases in regional qualification frameworks and in the implementation of national qualification frameworks. These developments create integration pressures manifest in the mutual recognition of higher education degrees, for which a new generation of regional conventions has emerged worldwide in the past two decades. We discuss these processes and their implications for understanding ‘national’ higher education as well as the threats and limits to the burgeoning higher education regime.     

A framework for monitoring instructional environments in a virtual world

Virtual worlds are gaining momentum as a platform for delivering simulation‐based educational experiences to students. However, a key aspect of virtual world‐based education that has received little attention is recording and analyzing students' in‐world actions. This capability is essential for assessing what students have learned through their simulation experience, and engaging the students in post‐simulation reflective learning. In this research, we present a framework for recording and analyzing students' actions in a virtual world. This framework is based upon pedagogical theories of exploratory and experiential learning, and is defined in a virtual‐world agnostic manner. The framework consists of two parts: (1) the Avatar Capabilities Model, which defines the educationally relevant actions that a student can take within a virtual world and (2) the Simulation Capture and Analysis toolkit that records and analyzes these actions, from an educational perspective. These analyses provide instructors with systematically collected evidence of the students' actions during their virtual world experience. This alleviates the need for instructors to directly observe students, thereby allowing for the scaling‐up of virtual worlds use in education. We have demonstrated the usefulness of the tool via a pilot study, with two students, in an emergency medical education context.